A Busy Developer’s Guide to RSS 2.0

Dave Winer

12 years ago

Disclaimer: This is not spec text.

Okay, so you’re busy and you’d like to get a quick implementation of RSS up asap and have it work with the largest number of feed readers and aggregators. Coool. Here are some tips for that will make your work go more smoothly, based on the experience of real developers.

1. Find a feed that’s popular and do what it does. This is the best advice you can get, for any format any time. If you do exactly what the New York Times does, or what Yahoo does, or what my feed does (it was the first) then you can’t go too far wrong, because all the feed readers will have had to deal with whatever these feeds do, because they are so popular, and old.

2. If you’re doing a podcast feed, at most one enclosure per item. There’s been some controversy about whether or not you can have more than one, and the spec doesn’t specifically disallow it, but if you want maximum interop, you shouldn’t have more than one enclosure per item.

3. No relative URLs. In your descriptions, and in links, all addresses should be absolute. Most readers and aggregators won’t do anything special with relative URLs, so your links will be broken in those tools if you use relative links.

4. Don’t include markup in any elements other than descriptions, at the channel level and at the item level. Where you include markup, you should encode ampersands and less-thans in the way proscribed recommended for HTML by the W3C.

5. Avoid using elements in namespaces when there are already core elements that do the same thing.

6. Use namespaces that are already in use by others before inventing new ones.

Notes

2. If this actually gets used by a lot of people, perhaps we should have a way for a feed to notify a reader that it is following these guidelines.

3. This is an informal document, and always will be, and it’s still very much a draft and a request for ideas. It is not spec text. If you think something belongs in this profile, post a comment, let’s consider it.

4. If have strongly differing ideas, please by all means, post your own BDG.

5. Some people will say I’m stupid, or corrupt, or incorrigible, even toxic, or any number of negative personal things. What they’re really saying is they don’t like me. That’s okay, no one is liked by everyone. It doesn’t hurt my feelings, and you shouldn’t worry about it, because I don’t.